Shot in black-and-white, “Tabu” flips back and forth from colonial Africa to present-day Portugal to spin an ornate tale.

Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’ latest film moves through different styles and eras, and proves that shooting in black and white is as versatile as it ever was. After an intro — about a 19th-century explorer in Africa who, in despair for a lost love, permits himself to be eaten by a crocodile — the film moves to contemporary Lisbon and Pilar (Teresa Madruga), who’s trying to care for a querulous old lady named Aurora (Laura Soveral).

When Aurora unexpectedly dies, Pilar searches out the one man the old lady had asked to see. The second half of the movie concerns the tale spun by this old man, Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo), of his adulterous affair with young Aurora 50 years before at a plantation near the fictitious Mount Tabu, in colonial Africa. This section has no audible dialogue — just Santo’s quiet narration in a style as lavish as a 19th-century novel, with music and the noises of nature popping off the soundtrack.

The story is ornate but easy to follow. It’s the dreamy look and sound of “Tabu” — half old, half modern — that give the film its haunting strangeness. It’s hard to work up any emotion over Aurora, who starts out selfish and shallow and only gets worse. The movie hooks you in the details — the idea, in something as small as two servants taking away a pingpong table, that other worlds spin within this one and can be glimpsed again and again at the edge of the frame.